Warning: Don’t Use Laundry Pod Buckets For Halloween Candy Collecting

Parents are being warned not to use laundry pod buckets as a Halloween container for your kids to collect their Halloween candy. These plastic buckets might be the perfect size for your little one’s hands to carry from house to house on Halloween to collect their candy, but this is a dangerous idea, according to Consumer Reports.

As ABC News suggests the buckets that the laundry detergent pods come in just may entice you to use them for some simple and fun family crafts this Halloween. But before your family starts decorating the buckets to use as a container for Halloween candy collecting, think about what you might be teaching your young kids.

Dan DiCerico from Consumer Reports warns that associating these pods with candy when it comes to kids isn’t a good idea. Another reason that Consumer Reports warns against using these buckets to hold Halloween candy is that the detergent residue lingers, reports Doris Sullivan, who is the associate director of product safety at Consumer Reports. Sullivan said:

“Detergent residue can linger, so you don’t want to reuse packaging from these products, especially for food or beverage storage.”

Back in 2012 Consumer Reports “called on manufacturers to make pods safer. “Despite the precautionary additions to the pod buckets and the pods themselves over the years, there are still cases of poisoning by exposure to the liquid laundry detergent inside these pods across all brands of the product.

The plastic around the pods has been made stronger so that they won’t burst when squeezed. The different manufacturers of these laundry pods also added a bitter-tasting substance as a coating to the outside of the pods to discourage a child from biting into them if they should accidentally get a hold of one.

A study published in the Pediatrics back in May 2016 “found that exposure to pods resulted in two deaths and that 104 children required intubation in 2013 and 2014. Other serious effects included coma, seizures, pulmonary edema, respiratory arrest, eye irritation, and corneal abrasion.”

So far this year, 8,665 children age 5 and younger have been exposed to the detergent in the liquid pods, according to the reports received by the American Association of Poison Centers. The children’s exposure came via “ingesting, inhaling, absorbing the contents through their skin, or getting it in their eyes.”

Poison-control centers received 4,899 reports of young children ingesting the regular liquid and powder laundry detergent from the beginning of this year until August. The symptoms from ingesting these products were much milder than what the children who were exposed to or ingested the liquid from the pods experienced.

According to the American Association of Poison Centers, the traditional laundry liquid offered different symptoms when accidentally swallowed, then the concentrated liquid inside the laundry pods.

“Swallowing that detergent (traditional laundry liquid) often causes a mild case of stomach upset, if there are any symptoms at all.”

For this reason, Consumer Reports highly suggest that parents use the traditional types of laundry detergent until the kids in your family or who spend time in your home are over the age of 6. Then bring in the laundry pods if you so chose, but still keep in mind the danger they pose for small kids who happen to visit your home.

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For all the reasons above, the people from Consumer Reports urge parents to keep away from using the pod buckets as candy vessels this Halloween. Despite being sturdy and just the right size, these buckets shouldn’t be an enticing container to children in any way, shape, or form because of the dangers the original contents can pose to kids.

Consumer Reports also reminds people who are caring for the elderly that these colorful pods can look like candy to a senior citizen suffering from dementia or some other form of cognitive impairment. These pods could pose danger for this population as well.